The site is roughly sub-rectangular, measuring around fifty metres on its longer axis, with the coastal cliff forming its natural boundary to the north-west and west. Three rectangular enclosures are defined by earthen banks roughly eighty centimetres high, built up against the steep slope on the south-west side, and a single upright stone, just half a metre tall, stands on more gently sloping ground closer to the cliff edge, aligned north-west to south-east. It is a spare, quietly deliberate arrangement, the kind of place that reads as marginal until you begin to ask why someone went to the trouble of organising it so carefully.

The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 already labels it as an "Old Burial Ground", suggesting it had passed out of active use, or at least out of living memory, well before the mid-nineteenth century. Local tradition holds that at least one member of the McCarthy-Townsend family was buried here. The McCarthy-Townsends were a notable West Cork family whose name reflects the intertwining of old Gaelic and later settler lineages that characterised the region's social history across several centuries. The choice of an island site for burial, while unusual, was not without precedent in Ireland; islands carried a degree of sanctity and, practically speaking, a degree of separation from the ordinary world. That this one was considered significant enough to be marked on an early Ordnance Survey map, and to retain an association with a specific family in oral memory, points to a site that once mattered to the people who used it, even if the full circumstances of its use have not survived.